The concept of consciousness was largely a product of individualism, of the various movements such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christianity, which supplied types of conceptual schemes that were very different from those which were appropriate to the shared life of the city-states.

He starts with the "Greek miracle," particularly Stoicism; moves on to Christianity, with its radical transformation of key elements of Greek philosophy; traces the rise of modern humanism in the epochal insights of Rousseau and Kant; and concludes with Nietzsche and Heidegger, the glowering giants of postmodernism, whose critiques of religion and rationality still echo today.